Fantastic Four and the Transformers (CONT)

by Chris McFeely

CHAPTER TWO

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NEW FRIENDS, OLD ENEMIES

New York City on the planet Earth. A normal day. A woman walked down fifth avenue loaded with shopping bags. A car driver honked his horn. A screaming child walked alongside his mother, dragging his feet as he went. Then suddenly, he stopped bawling, as a streak of red and blue shot by him overhead. Then it was gone. And he started wailing again.

The amazing Spider-Man swung through the concrete canyons of Manhattan on strands of his incredible webbing, contemplating the fact that he had experienced a relatively uneventful morning - a bank robbery and a hold-up, nothing serious.

“Help!” came a cry from below him. “Police!”

Looking down, Spider-Man could see an elderly woman screaming and pointing at a man running away from her, carrying a purse. With a sigh, Spidey swung down to attend to the mugger. A thin webline shot from his wrist with a thwip and entwined the mugger’s feet with dazzling speed. Then, equally as fast, Spidey dropped to the sidewalk, and grabbed the mugger by the cuff of his shirt.

“You’ve been a naughty boy,” Spider-Man chided, hoisting the mugger off the ground with his famed spider-strength. With a single bound, Spidey and the mugger were atop a lamppost.

“Wh-what are ya gonna do ta me?” the mugger stammered.

“Me?” Spider-Man asked. “Why...this!”

Multitudinous weblines sprayed forth from his wrists, wrapping the mugger up to his throat. Then, quick as flash, Spider-Man turned him upside-down and adhered him to the underside of the lamppost.

“This’ll keep you nice and warm until the police come for you,” Spider-Man informed the mugger sarcastically. “Take care then. Bye-bye now.”

In seconds, he was gone, spinning webs faster than one would have thought possible.

A pretty uneventful day. But not for much longer.

Rounding the next corner with a wide swing on his webline, Spider-Man’s mind was elsewhere. Suddenly, he snapped back to reality as a gigantic flash of energy filled the street. He quickly threw himself against the side of a building, there to watch what happened next.

A small hole appeared in the street. Not a hole through the road, you understand, more like a hole... in the air. Absurdly for the situation, it made Spider-Man think of Roger Rabbit. He pushed the thought from his mind, as the hole began to swell.

And swell.

And swell.

When it was almost touching him it seemed to explode, yet Spidey could feel no force or rush of air from it. He shielded his eyes from another, brighter flash of light that accompanied this ‘explosion’. When he looked again at where the hole had been, his eyes met a startling, but strangely familiar sight.

Two gigantic creatures stood in the middle of the road. They appeared to be robotic in nature - one was a mixture of red, orange and yellow, the other was red and blue, and distinctively cuboid. They each had glowing blue eyes, which scanned the street.

With the sound of a Band-Aid being peeled off, Spider-Man removed himself from the building that had been his observation point, and leapt onto the shoulder of the orange robot. Not very smart, he knew, but he didn’t have many more options.

“Hi there,” he said to the robot, who, although startled, made no hostile moves towards him. “I’m Spider-Man. Howzabout you tell me who or what you are, before I fill your cranial case full’a webbing?”

The robot was obviously distressed. As its companion moved to grab Spidey from his shoulder, he held up a hand.

“Greetings ‘Spider-Man’,” it said politely. “I am Rodimus Prime. This is Ultra Magnus.”

He gestured to the other robot.

Then Spider-Man knew why this seemed so familiar.

Several years ago, he had helped beings like these to rescue their leader from the clutches of their enemies. They were aliens, from a planet millions of light years away. The were known as Transformers. These two - he knew from the insignias upon their chests - were members of the faction known as the Autobots.

“Rodimus Prime,” he said, slowly. “Any relation to Optimus Prime?”

“I am his successor,” the one called Rodimus Prime responded. “How do you know of Optimus Prime?”

“It was a few years ago,” Spider-Man responded, “I helped some of your guys rescue a human from the... Decepticons, isn’t it?.”

“That event is well documented on Cybertron,” Ultra Magnus whispered to Rodimus Prime.

“Perhaps you could help us, Spider-Man,” Rodimus suggested. “We’re looking for the, uh, Fantastic Four.”

“Make it ‘Spidey’,” Spider-Man said warmly, “and sure I can help you! Just follow me!”

Raising his arm upwards, Spider-Man squeezed off a webline, which neatly adhered to a flagpole. Looking back, he almost had to cover his ears, and would have, had it not meant that he would lose his grip on the webbing, at the deafening grinding that filled air. As he watched, Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus’s physical forms altered completely. After much sliding of joints and pumping of pistons, in their place were a vehicle transporter and a futuristic-looking truck.

“Lead the way, ‘Spidey’!” Rodimus shouted above the noise of his own engine.

And then, the three strange beings were gone, leaving a group of very startled pedestrians behind.

* * *

“Fer the luvva my sweet Aunt Petunia!” exclaimed Benjamin J. Grimm, his rocky hands clutching his head, covering the spots where his ears would have been, had he any that were visually discernible. “What in the sam hill is that?”

Ben, known as the superhero called the Thing to the public, was speaking about a particularly loud siren that was presently sounding throughout Four Freedoms Plaza, the skyscraper homebase of the world renowned superhero team, the Fantastic Four. His fiery team-mate, Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, flew into the room, shouting over the klaxon.

“What the heck’s goin’ on?” he demanded to know.

“In answer to your question, Ben,” came a voice, “‘that’ is our new perimeter alarm warning system, and what is ‘going on’, Johnny, is that our security perimeter has just been breached!”

With a sound that would always remind Ben and Johnny of a balloon being twisted, the elongated form of Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, leader of the Fantastic Four appeared through the doorway, his amazing elastic powers stretching his body out ahead of his legs. Reaching an arm forward, he pressed a square button on a video-screen console across the room. The screen came to life, displaying an image of Spider-Man, adhering to the outside wall of the FF’s skyscraper home.

“Whaddaya suppose the ol’ webhead wants?” the Thing pondered, stroking his rocky chin with an equally rocky finger, causing a few grains of rock dust to splinter off.

“I’m not here for anything this time, Thing ol’ buddy,” came Spider-Man’s voice as he entered the room through an open window a few feet away from the viewscreen, which still displayed his image, even as he climbed in. “I’m just playing tour guide for some, uh, visitors.”

Happy to see his buddy, The Human Torch floated across the room to join Spidey at the window, followed by the Thing. Mr. Fantastic stretched his neck across the room and over the shoulders of his team-mates to peer out the window along with them. Below, they could see a vehicle transporter and a strange truck-like vehicle.

“Not exactly yer normal transport for tourists,” the Thing quipped, but then, his eyes bugged out of his head at what he saw next. The two vehicles began to change. Their various components moved so fast that they became a blur, but when the grinding noise had faded, in their place were two distinctively robotic creatures, who stood level with the window the group was staring out of. Below, pedestrians were already stopping to stare.

“Fantastic Four, meet Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus,” Spidey introduced the two Autobots. “Autobots, Mr. Fantastic, the Thing, and the Human Torch.”

“Pleased to, ah, make your acquaintance,” Mr. Fantastic greeted the two robots. He extended his arm out through the window, increasing it in size, so as to shake the hands of each of the Autobots in turn.

“Likewise, I’m sure,” Ultra Magnus responded.

“These guys need your help with something,” Spider-Man went on, gesturing for Rodimus Prime to explain to Richards why they were here. Rodimus cleared his ‘throat’.

“This might be hard for you to believe,” Rodimus began, but was cut off by a grunt from the Thing. Nonplussed, he continued: “but we’re from the future - the year 2006, to be precise.”

“We’ve seen farther into the future than that,” Mr. Fantastic commented.

“That’s as well as maybe,” Ultra Magnus chipped in, “but we’re also what you would call aliens.”

“Been there, done that,” the Torch chuckled.

“Looks like we came to the right place,” Rodimus said, over his shoulder to Magnus. “I’ll get to the point, then - our homeworld is under threat from a being known as Galactus.”

There was no witty jibe from any of the group this time.

“I thought we’d seen the last’a that mook,” the Thing muttered.

“So you came here, back in time, to enlist our help in defeating him,” Mr. Fantastic deduced.

“Exactly,” Rodimus responded succinctly.

“We’d be glad to help,” came a voice. Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus searched the area with their visual sensors, but detected nothing. Noting their confusion, Spider-Man helped lighten their minds.

“I’d also like to introduce Susan Storm Richards - the Invisible Woman!” he proudly proclaimed.

As if on cue, the air in the centre of the room began to shimmer, and slowly thicken, taking on an altogether different appearance. Within seconds, the delectable form of the Invisible Woman had totally manifested itself within the room.

“Charmed,” she said.

“Might I inquire,” Mr. Fantastic interjected, “how you got here? I doubt a ship large enough to transport beings such as yourselves would go... shall we say, unnoticed.”

“With this,” Rodimus answered, holding out the time jumper. Mr. Fantastic would happily have taken it to examine, had it not been for the fact that it was almost twice his size. “It’s what we call a time-jumper. Our enemy, Galvatron, will invent the design for it in the year 2006, and will travel back in time to the present to try and alter history. When the orignal was destroyed, we created this unit. It's only experimental, but the circumstances were dire...”

“We’re well-associated with time travel,” the Invisible Woman pointed out, remembering full well how her and Reed’s son, Franklin, had been taken into the future by Reed’s scheming father, Nathaniel, and had been returned to the present mere seconds after he left, a fully grown man, having spent his life in Nathaniel’s apocalyptic future. Even Reed had experienced the horrors of that world first hand, as he confronted Hyperstorm - Franklin’s future son, and his own grandchild. It seemed that Reed died during the battle, and Sue had nearly suffered a nervous breakdown, but it was revealed that Reed was still alive, trapped in the future, for many months. But that was in the past. Reed was back - and Franklin had been regressed back into a four-year-old child.

“Well then,” Magnus said enthusiastically, “...if you’re ready to go...?”

“Indubitably,” Reed answered.

Rodimus’s metallic finger stabbed down on the time-jumper’s button again, and the two robots and four fantastic humans disappeared in a blinding flash.

Spider-Man rubbed the back of his neck, still adhering to the wall of Four Freedoms plaza. A pretty uneventful morning.